‘The desire for total explanation’

I was talking with my niece about her mother’s death, and the profound spiritual and even metaphysical questions about suffering and ultimate meaning it raises. I remembered being moved by a short WSJ column the theologian David Bentley Hart wrote after the mass deaths from the 2004 tsunami, so I picked up a copy of the book he wrote expanding on that thesis: “The Doors of the Sea.” Finished it last night. It’s a thin book, but a deep one. I’m going to have to read it a second time to make sure I understand the fullness of Hart’s argument.

Two things from the book resonate in my heart this morning. The first is Hart’s contention that Christians have to see the world with double vision:

Rather, the Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all tis beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation,” an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.

This is a very deep mystery, and because a mystery, it defies logical explanation. We can “know” the mystery, though, by embracing it with faith — but this requires that we free ourselves from “the burden of the desire for total explanation.”

The prejudice we live with today is that everything can, in theory, be explained — that is to say, known intellectually. This is why some believe that anything that cannot be explained empirically and logically cannot be said to be true. That is a way of sorrow and self-deception. Hart does not minimize the objections to the idea that a God who would allow innocents to suffer is either not all good, or not all powerful — well, he does minimize some of them — nor does he go easy on Christians who offer glib rationalizations when faced with moral monstrosity. This passage from Hart’s 2005 First Things essay turns up in the book:

I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

The reason I post this here today is that it’s helpful to me to be reminded that “the desire for total explanation” is one that cannot be fulfilled. I can grasp this from a theological perspective. Let me ask you of a more mathematical and philosophical bent: Is this statement of Hart’s (which is entirely consistent with Eastern Orthodox theology) also consistent with Godel’s incompleteness theorems?

UPDATE: There’s more I want to say here. One thing I’m struggling to understand now, and that Hart’s book is helping me with, is the nature of the relationship I had with my sister. I keep going back on this blog to talking about how you will be doomed to frustration if you expect the South to make logical sense — but you will also miss some deep truths about human nature if you insist that the South can be dismissed as merely foolish, hypocritical, and so forth, because it doesn’t make sense. My sister and I loved each other, but we had a relationship that was at times difficult. I’m not going to say much about it here — hey, something’s got to be in the book! — but it would not be truthful to act as if all was always well between us. Nor, I must say, would it be truthful to write as if I were the only one with fault in this regard. Even though ours was, and is, a happy family, that doesn’t mean there weren’t complications.

For years I have puzzled over why I was, as far as I know, the only person on this earth to whom Ruthie didn’t extend boundless patience and understanding. I think I know why, and some things I’ve learned since she died have helped me to understand this better. Ultimately, though, this is a secret she took to her grave. She may not have known herself. The point is, I’ll never know. And yet, my parents yesterday, in conversation, casually made a revelation that hit me with a slow, gathering force, the fullness of which didn’t reach my shore, so to speak, until bedtime last night. It was not an explanation, strictly speaking, but it was a revelation that both startled me and resolved so much painful mystery about the way Ruthie and I were with each other. I’m not going to say what it was here, in part because this needs to be in the book, and in part because it needs to be in the book because it’s going to take me a while to work through the meaning of this. I can say, though, that it has a lot to do with love, loyalty, and the double vision that Hart writes of, one that is necessary if one is going to affirm life as it is, not as our rationalizations would have it be.

When I told Julie what my parents had told me about Ruthie, she said, “God, that is a benediction from beyond the grave.” Indeed it is. It’s hard for me to think about it without tears welling up. How awesomely strange is it that such beauty shines through such brokenness.

32 Responses to ‘The desire for total explanation’

There is no sorrow or deception in looking at a tsunami and saying, “It was earthquake and a tsunami. They happen,” and then not waste time looking for any other reason. It would rather seem that the sorrow is all on the part of the folks who seek to find meaning in things that really, simply have no meaning for they only succeed in making themselves more miserable in the process

Years ago my pancreas decided to digest itself after failing to digest a gallstone and the result was four seriously uncomfortable months dying in a hospital. Not once did I ask myself “why.” I was only interested in getting out of it alive with as little physical discomfort as possible. And it worked to the amazement of the hospital chaplain who never heard a word of hand-wringing self pity in the face of the injustice of the divine or one iota of hand-wringing repentence for having lived the life of a happy reprobate.

1. The first is that any system of logical rules is either consistent and incomplete, or complete and inconsistent. This can be demonstrated through a logical paradox where applying a true logical statement to itself, makes the statement false, but true when not applied to itself. The statement is either true/incomplete or false/complete.

2. The second is that logical rules must depend upon axioms that are outside of the system. This is often restated that there are more truths than you can prove.

An important point to remember is that the incompleteness theorem applies to logical systems. Gödel came up with the theory to show that Hilbert’s program to base mathematics in logic could not be attained. So it’s an open question if it applies to humans, the universe as a whole, or God because we don’t understand the foundations of these things. For example if the computational theory of mind is correct, then the theorem applies to humans. If the universe is really a giant cellular automata then it applies to it as well. God is an open question on top of an open question, but theologians seem to imply God prefers to be consistent and incomplete by excluding evil from himself.

Also I don’t have a problem with the notion of axioms, but in general axioms are truths that are considered self evident, or true by definition. If a point is up for debate it isn’t considered an axiom, but a postulate. In mathematics some of the most productive periods were shortly after a postulate was abandoned (e.g. the parallel postulate), so it is a good idea to keep that distinction in mind. This notion that axioms should be self evident is the reason my dander gets up when people claim they have truths they can’t prove. It’s either an axiom that is obviously true or its up for debate, but it’s not a truth.

I will also admit to being unable to see two worlds at once, which is probably why I can’t be a Christian. To me the world is likely exactly what its creator wants it to be. Now it might not be what we want if we could created the world for our benefit, but nobody asked our opinion.

MH gives a good summary. My intuition is that human minds are not ultimately computational–I follow Roger Penrose in that (though I realize his views are controversial)–but I do think that a lot of the processes we use our minds for involve computational aspects. Thus I think the Incompleteness Theorem is at least partly applicable to human thought, or to at least many of the attempted systematizations of human thought.

I would say, MH, that IMO it’s impossible for humans to function without things that can’t strictly be proven. If one wants to take it at absurdum, none of us can definitively prove we’re not brains in a vat (unless one buys into Descartes’s argument on this, which I don’t). More broadly, almost all moral rules are postulates in the sense you describe. “One ought not to kill innocent people” isn’t self-evident in the way that “a part of a finite whole is always less than the whole of which it’s a part” is. Most non-psychopaths, though, would view it as “self-evident”, using that term in a much less rigorous way.

Even if one balks at speaking in such terms of moral rules, one needs to have them. To have a functioning society you have to have a setup where most people most of the time act as if the basic moral prescriptions are self-evident truths whether they actually are or not. The alternative is chaos or culture wars in which different sides are pitted against each other with differing moral postulates neither side can ever “prove”. All that can happen is one or the other overpowers the other and imposes its will, the two sides find a way to “agree to disagree”, or one side changes its mind.

As to “whys”, reading Charles just confirms once more my theory that people’s temperaments determine a whole lot. Some people, religious or not, are almost compulsively driven to ask “why”. This is what drives scientific endeavor–whether the scientist is a believer or not, he wants to know why things work as they do, for example. Others just aren’t interested in “whys”. They figure the world is as it is and have no interest at all in whys and wherefores. They are merely concerned with how to function best in the world as it is. For obvious reasons, each side would find it rather hard to understand the other.

This is also why I tend to be a universalist. It’s hard for me to imagine a God who creates people whose temperament makes it more or less impossible for them to believe or even to care about belief, and then damn them for how He made them to begin with. On the postulate ( ) that there is a great hereafter, it would certainly be a lot less interesting with Charles and MH around!

Agreeing with Charles and John E: I have no use for grand speculative explanations. If you are a Christian, I think you focus on imitating Jesus of Nazareth in the way you live. Bad things happen; deal with them in courage and grace, and continue. Speculations may be interesting for some but in the end don’t accomplish anything, in my opinion.

Hart does not minimize the objections to the idea that a God who would allow innocents to suffer is either not all good, or not all powerful — well, he does minimize some of them — nor does he go easy on Christians who offer glib rationalizations when faced with moral monstrosity.

This is why I come down on the side of amoral, non-therapeutic deism. It think it’s incredible to suppose that there’s not some prime mover/creator/designer that’s ultimately behind the Universe and set the whole game in motion, but I think it’s also equally incredible that anyone can read the news each day and think this supposed creator gives a damn about what happens on this planet.

Fair enough, but Rod is clearly coming at his existential angst from a traditional Christian perspective, which presupposes an all-powerful and all-knowing God whose providence is meticulous and whose counsel is from “everlasting to everlasting,” to use a phrase common in Scripture.

Humans lack exhaustive knowledge. That’s the bottom line. Given our myopia, our prejudices, our dark hearts and corrupt minds, we should not presume to know the true consequences and implications of phenomena.

Consider:

“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out” (Romans 11:33).

Also:

“Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea further; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it” (Ecclesiastes 8:17).

“Even though ours was, and is, a happy family, that doesn’t mean there weren’t complications.”

That describes so many families — my own family of origin included.

“For years I have puzzled over why I was, as far as I know, the only person on this earth to whom Ruthie didn’t extend boundless patience and understanding.”

You have been revealing, in little bits like this, that your relationship with your sister was complicated and not always peaceful. Is your family okay with you writing about such personal matters? I am really looking forward to the book, in part to see how you explore complicated family relationships.

It sounds like you and your sister were in many ways very different. Isn’t that interesting, how children of the same two parents, growing up in the same household, can turn out so different — can *be* so different? It’s true of me and my siblings, and my husband and his. I’m sure it will be true of my kids as well. To m, it goes to show that we can’t know what effect our parenting will or won’t have. Our children are human beings and not clay, and will grow and change without our being able to control it.

This is what drives scientific endeavor–whether the scientist is a believer or not, he wants to know why things work as they do, for example. Others just aren’t interested in “whys”. They figure the world is as it is and have no interest at all in whys and wherefores.

Tumarion, I’d submit that “why did all those people have to die in that tsunami” and “why do photons act sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle” are two different types of questions.

Godel’s incompleteness theorems are about formal axiomatic theories – i.e. a set of axioms from which all theorems are deduced using the rules of logic. There are a wide variety of theories to which they apply. But if they are not foramlizable axiomatic theories where the objects of inquiry are the theorems (statements in the theory) derived by the rules of logic, they don’t apply.

The first incompleteness theorem says that if such a theory is consistent (the axioms don’t contradict each other) then there are statements in the theory which are neither provable nor disprovable in (the language of) that theory.

The second incompleteness theorem says that if such a theory is consistent, then the statement “This theory is consistent” is neither provable nor disprovable in that theory. This does not mean that one cannot prove the consistency of the theory, but that one cannot do it in the language of the theory itself. You have to add some assumptions that do not follow from the axiomitazation. But so what? We do that all the time. You can’t prove the consistency of PA (Peano arithmetic) in PA, but you can in ZFC (Zermelo-Frankel set theory + the axiom of Choice). Indeed, you can prove it in a much weaker system than ZFC.

The claims that some folks make because of a poor understanding of Godel’s theorems are either infuriating or laughable to theoretical mathematicians, depending on one’s temperment.

I’d submit that “why did all those people have to die in that tsunami” and “why do photons act sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle” are two different types of questions.

That’s a valid point, but when you consider how much training it takes to try to find out why photons act as they do when most people neither understand nor care about quantum mechanics; and if you hear how scientists talk about “knowing the mind of God” (even if it’s Spinoza’s God or God-as-physical-laws), the beauty of the equations, or the passion infusing Carl Sagan’s voice when he talked about such things, I think the two cases are perhaps closer than they seem.

I mean, from a completely, strictly materialistic viewpoint, the fact that we are composed of atoms forged in numerous stars billions of years ago is no more exciting than the fact that my briefcase contains class rosters or that my garbage is composed of too much leftover food. But when Sagan says in Cosmos, “We are made of starstuff,” you can hear the almost religious awe in his voice–agnostic though it may have been. Drive nature out with a pitchfork and it’ll still come back. There seems to be some natural religious impulse, if you will, that can attach itself to whatever is available in the individual. It’s probably present more in some than others, and maybe not at all in some individuals.

The point is that I think the deep motive behind the quest to understand the cosmos and the person who asks why the tsunami occurred may be ultimately the same.

Fred, I’m not sure you were trying to contradict this point, but if you read the footnote added to ‘Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der “Principia Mathematica” und verwandter Systeme’ in 1963, Gödel himself makes it very clear that *he* certainly thought he was making a point about the nature of human intelligence versus mechanical devices. Gödel was a philosophical idealist, and his motivation for writing the paper was to push just the sort of conclusions that are those I expect you mean by “infuriating or laughable to theoretical mathematicians.” Gödel may have been mistaken, but it is neither ridiculous nor does it require a lack of knowledge of mathematics to see these implications in his theorem.

Turmarion, I would say that Gödel’s theorem probably applies to language*, but human thought is more than language. Feelings play a big role in our behavior, especially emotions like empathy, love, remorse and regret in the area of morality. Psychopaths are described as lacking empathy which means they lack a key motivator of moral behavior.

On the previous blog we discussed how not all metaphysical assumptions are equal in their degree of uncertainty. While people may argue the brain in a vat hypothesis, people act as if the external world is not an illusion. So there seems enough consensus to declare the existence of reality an axiom.

Among normal people morality seems to exist in a continuum from axiom to postulate. The golden rule is essentially an axiom among non-sociopaths, but other behaviors are more culturally relative. For example I don’t have a problem with birth control, but other people do. So you are correct, a society needs to create a moral consensus where people act as if they are self-evident truths. But I think people will always push on these boundaries out of a desire for an advantage over others real or perceived.

* If I had the time I would love to create a digraph of all words in the dictionary which showed which words were defined in terms of other words, what words define those words, and which are then ultimately defined in terms of the words they defined! In that way I could show that there must be words that are not in the dictionary, and can not even be spoken that are the axiom words that exist outside of spoken language.

Rod, I can see how a comforting myth is more appealing than a hard truth. I can see how if a comforting myth doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way you still want to go, then you would double down and say that making sense isn’t necessary. For me that’s rationalizing a comforting myth.

Godel was a genius…at logic. At metaphysics…not so much. My former professor Hilary Putnam told us many Godel stories. I highly recommend reading about his incredible life and sad slide into paranoia and a painful death. George Boolos always emphasized to us never to export the incompleteness results beyond axiomatizable formal languages. And over beers he would occasionally arch an eyebrow and wonder, “Why doesn’t anyone ever want to talk about the completeness theorem?” No cliche intended.

MH: If I had the time I would love to create a digraph of all words in the dictionary which showed which words were defined in terms of other words, what words define those words, and which are then ultimately defined in terms of the words they defined! In that way I could show that there must be words that are not in the dictionary, and can not even be spoken that are the axiom words that exist outside of spoken language.

That sounds almost like Polanyi’s concept of the “tacit dimension”. Have you read his book of that name?

It’s a great book, and one I’ve assigned to my students on several occasions.

My favorite passage in the book:
“Ivan’s rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees—and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality—that it would be far more terrible if it were.”

At the time of the 2004 tsunami, I thought of it this way, and still do: Without oceans and plate tectonics, we would not have life on this planet in the first place. And the oceans and continental plates have their own course of existence, utterly oblivious to ours. But we have a slight advantage in knowing about them, and knowing a little bit about how they work. So we have somewhat better than even odds to get out of the way when they join together to make tsunamis. So knowledge is power. Also, sh!t happens.

I imagine that many people find some measure of consolation in the idea that someday there “shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” To me, this is a horrible fantasy, and to some extent helps me understand some of the hostility to religion, which I do not in any way share, of a Hitchens or Dawkins. Why horrible – why not, at worst, a harmless fantasy, an understandable yearning for some hope? Because it represents a serious, even terrible diversion from the efforts we must undertake to mitigate the effects of all the horrors and injustices we suffer on this earth, in this life. In natural disasters or illness, we must strive to use our brains – God-given, if you like – to do the best we can to predict, prevent, or diminish their effects, and failing that offer the only consolation available – again, God given if you like: the consolation we can and must offer each other. And when the injustices are manmade, our task, or obligation, is to do everything we can to eliminate them. Suggesting that reality is not real and that some radiant future awaits us is a prescription for inaction, an acceptance of things as they are. It is actually a message of hopelessness, not hope, because it suggests that there is nothing ultimately to be done in the world as it is. I may be speaking for myself alone, but I reject this view.

I once read a scifi story in which a race of superbeings had chosen to take away all of humanity’s pain, manipulating us with their inconceivable powers so that there was no crime, suffering or sin. They couldn’t annul physical necessities so there was still death, but they could instantly assuage grief so even death was not a thing of grief for people. And then, after generations of this regime, they had a terrible revelation: that what they had done had profoundly wronged humanity because they had taken away choice and eliminated any possibility of true growth. In self-loathing and revulsion the superbeings destroyed themselves, except for one who in an act of expiation went among humanity to witness the chaos that resulted when their protectioon was no longer active.
A strange cautionary tale about utopia.

Turmarion, I haven’t read Polanyi’s book, but it sounds interesting from its Google search results.

This idea occurred to me because I’ve written a number of parsers for computer languages, and parsers are usually* not written in the language they parse. When you look at the grammar and syntax for the parsed language versus the parser implementation language they are usually quite different. This lead me to thinking that human language might be similar, and my dictionary digraph is analogous to a Backus–Naur Form grammar used in computer science to define computer languages. When I heard about Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar concept for natural languages it cemented this idea in my head.

Basically spoken human language must depend upon another language that can’t be spoken.

* self-hosting compilers are the exception, but they require a bootstrap compiler written in another language to solve the chicken and egg problem. This chicken and the egg problem goes many levels deep into computer hardware before the rubber finally meets the road with logic gates and ALU’s that actually do computation.

Regarding the incompleteness theorems, I can’t recommend the Feferman paper I linked to above strongly enough. For anyone interested in the theorems, it’s a must read. I hadn’t read it in years, but skimming through it today, he recommends two books for non-experts on the theorems:

“By Torkel Franzén, who unfortunately died in midlife
last spring of cancer:

“Inexhaustibility: A non-exhaustive treatment”, is for readers with a moderate amount of logical and mathematical background.

“Gödel’s Theorem. An incomplete guide to its use and abuse”, is for the general reader.

About your sister: Only friends and family who really love you will take the trouble to challenge your lazy assumptions. Others will let you wallow in them because it is easier than to take the trouble to get involved. The ones who care are the ones who help/make you grow.

I may want to read that book. I have never been satisfied with explanations that pain or suffering were part of God’s will. Death and the terrible things that humans do to each other make no sense. There’s no rhyme or reason to the rape and beating of a little girl, whether here or a few thousand miles a way in Afghanistan, no sense in tsunamis and terrorist attacks and death squads and regimes that torture their own people. There’s no sense even when a soldier, following the ethics of war, shoots and kills an enemy fighter in defense of his unit. It may be justified, but it’s still a great wrong in a spiritual sense. Death is a waste, that’s putting it far too mildly, but it’s the best way I can put it.

I don’t trust too much to hope, either. I’ve been in a place where I’ve lost track of it. I sought out help, time passed, life went on, things got better, and I’m here nearly as whole and sane I was before, and maybe wiser (though I doubt it.) I know people who’ve lost faith in similar circumstances, so don’t put all your stock in that either. It could happen to you. We all have our limits and life can push you past them.

What remains then is love, and the promise that God has already reconciled all things. Things will be whole again, and as you say, there will be an end to all this darkness, beyond all the hope and faith we feeble human beings can muster. The mystery is the delay. I have no answers to that Big Question which human beings have been asking since their first revelation from their creator. That is the common tradition of Monotheistic faith (yes, all three of them, when not at each other’s throats.) Waiting and expectation for deliverance. Maranatha.

As far your sister, I do look forward to the book. But try not to be hard on yourself. It is the most challenging to be true and charitable and real to the people closest to us, all the moreso the ones who’ve known us since our birth.

For those of you who are not familiar with Clarke’s published writing, but have seen the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, when you finish the story replay in your mind the last extended scene of the movie.

Rod: Permit me to claim being one of the first (if not the first) person in line to read your book.